Life Through the Eyes of a Baby Chick
They took our beaks, but we will tell our story.
Day 1
I don’t know where I am, or what is happening. All I know is that I burst my head through shell and into a world of horror. I feel the ground moving beneath me, and it’s hard to stay upright. I am tightly encircled by other newly hatched chicks, and we knock and fall into each other. The air is filled with the sounds of whirring, grinding, and thousands of panicked voices. The deafening sounds and confinement crush in on me, and I hear my voice join the chorus of hysterical cries.
My panic attracts the attention of the chicks on either side of me, a girl and a boy. The boy’s wide eyes meet mine, and for a brief moment, I feel calmer. My thumping heart makes it hard to breathe, but at least I’m not alone in my fear.
Although he makes no sound, I sense his dread.
A shadow, massive and looming, descends upon me. The air is crushed from my lungs as I am roughly lifted up. A second later, I slam back down onto the moving ground, hard. I feel my body break. I see the boy thrown down even harder, away from me. The ground moves beneath him too, but in a different direction. The sounds grow louder, and I watch as the boy disappears, falling out of sight. I struggle to get up, pain pulsating through my broken bones, and crane my head to see where he has gone.
The sight of his fate wrenches a sound from my chest, so loud and sharp I think my throat will tear. I watch him fall into a dozen spinning blades. There is nothing I can do. Blood. So much more than I could have imagined from a body so small. His feathers stick to the blades as they continue to grind him up, alive. The sounds of his bones crunching are drowned by panicked cries, as male chicks are killed throughout the room.
The ground moves steadily on, and I am carried away from the boy. Mallory, I decide to call him. Giving him a name is a strange feeling. My pain seems to burn even stronger, but also lessen slightly. I notice that the girl is beside me again. She remained quiet, but I know she saw what I saw. The indescribable terror that I feel is reflected in her eyes. We move on in silence. I tell her that I decided to call the boy Mallory. I watch her. She is still too scared to speak. I know that she, like Mallory, could die at any second, so I decide to give her a name as well. Cecilia, I call her.
She looks at me, and says that my name is Claudia.
We are carried on, tumbling in a disorienting blur of colors, sounds and pain. We pass more horrors, each somehow worse than the last. It is impossible to process. All of the boys around us are killed, some ground up like Mallory. We hear cries of panic and pain emanating from an enormous bag filled to the brim with male chicks. Baby chicks chirp in anguish as they crush those beneath them, and are crushed themselves. The hatchlings on the bottom are surely dead, crushed to death.
As we watch, a giant beast, even bigger than the bag, stuffs the chicks down and closes the top. It cuts off the birds’ meager air supply — a slow and painful death. Their cries grow fainter, slowly dying out, until they are finally silent.
I don’t understand — why is this happening to us?!
One of the creatures lifts me into the air. Excruciating pain. I am thrown to the moving ground once again. Cecelia lands next to me, and she is a gruesome sight. Her beak is brown and red, burned and bleeding, a stub of what it was before. I try to cry out, but can’t. Sharp pain shoots through my beak, and I realize I must look like Cecelia. We no longer speak. We just look at each other as the ground moves on, surrounded by death, pain, and piercing noise.
A third beast lifts me away, and I am crammed into a box with hundreds of other chicks, followed by Cecelia. I feel the box rise into the air, and it is set atop another box, also full of wailing chicks. Deafening sounds follow two slamming doors, and we are plunged into darkness. Whatever we are inside starts to move.
My instincts tell me that I must escape this box at all costs — but I can’t. We are packed in so tightly that I am flattened by the birds around me. Even my lungs and chest feel crushed. I can’t move more than a fraction of an inch. I can barely breathe. My heart beats harder as the panic swells again, but I know it’s nothing compared to the birds below us.
Eventually, a heaviness weighs down on me. Against my will, I drift in and out of sleep. However, I’m kept from true sleep by sudden jerks of movement and cries of panic that still surround me.
We have been moving for what feels like forever when we begin to slow down. We stop. The doors open. The shadows of creatures descend. One reaches for Cecelia and grabs her, despite my attempts to peck her out of its grasp with what remains of my feeble, flat beak. Before I know it, the doors close and we are moving once more.
I never see Cecelia again.
To Be Continued.
This story is not fiction. The practices depicted in this story are standard for egg production around the world — including the United States. In the U.S., hundreds of thousands of newly hatched chicks go through this process each year, and every single male is killed.
Chickens are intelligent, empathetic, emotional, and they suffer just as humans do. It does not matter if the eggs are conventional, organic, humane, free range, or cage free, they all suffer the same cruelty. The Humane Society has said this about the egg industry in the United States.
“Male chicks, considered a byproduct of commercial hatcheries, are killed soon after they hatch. The females are typically beak-trimmed, usually with a hot blade, to prevent them from developing the abnormal pecking behaviors that manifest in substandard environments.”
The only way to truly stop this cruelty is to stop funding the egg industry.
